North Dakota has 750,000 people and 2 senators. There is no place in the country where your dollars count for more. This is an Airlift-style campaign. We support candidates by helping local groups doing year round work on issues people care about. Then they get the people they’ve activated to the polls.
The Movement Voter Project, a partner of Airlift, has already raised half of the money required for a "Vote MOB" plan to keep Heidi in her senate seat and to create some infrastructure that will last. They recruited an incredible young organizer from Fargo named Leewana Thomas. She has moved back home and is pulling together an Alabama-style campaign—where we helped fund the almost-overnight hiring of 600 black organizers when it was clear that Doug Jones had a serious shot at his senate seat. Leewana is hiring 100+ organizers and giving mini-grants to dozens of tiny but passionate local groups.
They will be using every trick in the book that MVP has learned about getting young people to vote. Pizza parties, mobile petting zoos, DJs at the polls, voting guides, five sweeps of the dorms on Election Day. A similar program increased student voting in Virginia by 50% from 2016 to 2017 and is now built into NextGen America’s youth engagement all over the country.
North Dakota does not require voter registration to vote. There are a couple of motivating ballot measures—marijuana and anti-corruption. And there is one week of early voting. Leewana’s team will find people who weren’t planning to vote, help them get their voter ID, and get them to the polls. She says that “the organizing on the reservations has galvanized people and they should have a pretty strong well organized turnout operation. It’s actually the cities and campuses now that have the least organized progressive infrastructure--that’s where more than half the voters are, and that’s the gap we’re focused on.”
This is a special project of Airlift, an all-volunteer, zero-overhead organization. We help you get your money to effective grassroots groups in battleground districts, not consultants and TV. You can donate to this special project here.